Do guns kill or do people kill people?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Do guns kill or do people kill people?
Position1 of 2›: Guns kill people
Argument‹4 of 4: The bullet from the gun causes death

The path a bullet takes is what kills a person. They can cut through skin, destroy tissue, damage organs, and shatter through bone. This is the intended consequence of assault rifles and guns. Guns release bullets that in turn cause death.

The argument

Guns do kill people; more specifically, the bullets released from guns kill people. It is scientifically inaccurate to say that guns don’t kill people because they carry the agents that do the killing within them. The agents are bullets. The kinetic energy from the bullet, when transmitted into another person’s body, damages organs, break bones, and destroys cells and tissue. If a bullet enters a person's body and hits critical organs, that person is going to die. The bullet will have killed them. The guns themselves are the actual instruments of death. For instance, just as the HIV virus is the agent that causes AIDs, the bullets that are fired from guns are the agents that cause large-scale death. Guns do kill people because they harbor the bullets that do.

Premises

[P1]Bullets are the agents that kill: their kinetic energy, transmitted into a body, damages organs, breaks bones, and destroys tissue, and striking critical organs causes death. [P2] Guns harbor and fire these bullets — just as HIV is the agent that causes AIDS, the bullets fired from guns are the agents that cause death — making guns the actual instruments of death. [C] Therefore, because the bullet from the gun causes death, guns kill people.

Counter-arguments

Guns do not kill people. Even if a bullet is the one that directly causes death, this cannot happen without the action of a human being. Death cannot happen without a person who pulls the trigger and releases those bullets. People with no moral compass, with mental illness, or with no sort of sanity allow such agents of harm to kill innocent people. It is imperative that the true problem is addressed, which is the people who are doing the actual killing. A gun does not become a dangerous weapon unless it is in the hands of a dangerous person.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The ballistics are correct and are not what the question asks. Describing the physical chain by which a wound kills settles the mechanism of death, while the debate this slogan belongs to is about responsibility — which the premise does not touch. [Rejecting P2] The HIV analogy is the argument's weakest move. A virus replicates and spreads with nobody directing it, whereas a firearm does nothing until a person loads, aims and fires it, so the comparison drops the feature that distinguishes the two cases. Calling guns "instruments" concedes the point, since an instrument is by definition something used by someone. [Rejecting C] The conclusion is true on a reading nobody contests — deaths are caused by bullets fired from guns — and unsupported on the reading the position requires, which sets the object against the person. The productive version of this argument concerns how much easier and more lethal a firearm makes a killing, and it needs neither the physics nor the analogy.